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Life is full of stuff. Responsibilities, problems even entertainment of modern life can feel like a fire hose sometimes. It is easy to get swept up by it all. Relationships, bills, school, work.. we have all been there and know what stretching yourself thin to make ends meet feels like. Stress can kill. We only get one ticket on this ride of life so any tools to help avoid stress can be life savers.

[Optimism is overrated]

The half-filled glass is an old, tired cliche and yet can be a useful prop if we start over. Instead of considering the amount of water in the glass and it’s relation to your attitude, there is better lesson about stress that is so obvious and yet so easily hidden.

Using a raised and stretched arm, hold the half-filled glass up and ask how much does it weigh? The absolute value doesn’t actually matter here, instead the weight is relative to how long one holds it up. A few moments is effortless. A few minutes and your arm may start to stress and muscles burn. After a few hours and you would have muscle tremors and serious cramps.

This experience is not unlike how we deal with life and stress. A thought weighs nothing but hold it long enough and it will gain mass and become too much to bare. Think about some responsibility, problem or worry for a short time and it isn’t so bad. Obsess over it at three in the morning instead of sleeping and it will fill your life with pain and misery.

The obvious answer which you may have already thought of is “put the glass down”, but that is easier said than done. Instead a more realistic approach is to develop a way to lessen the impact of the weight. Make a thought weightless again. Intrusive, repetitive thoughts and worry is the bane of the modern world. Sometimes it is extremely hard to control and in some of the worst cases, cause one to become paralyzed.

[Blast off]

The first astronauts who made it to orbit in the 1960s reported the sight of Earth from orbit and then later during the missions to the Moon, seeing the entire Earth in a single window was mind shattering. The impact was so profound, the change in perspective threw them out of their normal mind streams and thoughts, and allowed them to reevaluate the scope of their lives, how they saw themselves, relation to others, and the Earth as a whole Mother.

Their worries and worldly possessions all melted away. They seemed almost ridiculous from this height, like meeting God. Billions of people were now bacteria. Everything you ever came in contact with your whole life was smaller than a postage stamp and not more than a tiny dark spot to the eye, if at all. Continents fly past under them like painted lines on a road, the black ink and rest of known existence to their backs. The deep and light blue hues of the oceans, the green, brown and grays of the land. All of it held together under a thin wrapper of air. They all could not believe how thin our atmosphere is when seen from space. How unbelievably vulnerable we all are, flying through space together on this floating rock with no way to steer or avoid anything in our path. Spaceship Earth was coined during that time for just this reason.

Can you imagine yourself there? Traveling at 30,000 miles per hour. A Sunset and rise every 90 mins. What that must of felt like to be that far from all of humanity, to see ourselves in such a new scale. It is as if a single cell blasting off of your arm and floating in front of you to see the whole body it is part of. They must of felt like they were looking through God’s eyes.

Indeed, the first published photograph of Earth from orbit kicked off the environmental movement en masse. You didn’t have to visit space to impart some of the same emotions and change in perspective.

Could something like this experience exist elsewhere? A change in perspective be found without reaching space? Yes, in fact it can be with you all the time. Much like how we know less about the oceans than we do space, we know less about our true selves than we do each other.

In fact, you can have this spiritual experience at any time by becoming an internal astronaut and creating some space between the thinker and the know-er. You are the know-er, your mind is the thinker. This fact and insight lies at the heart of Far Eastern religion. Humans have known for thousands of years that there is a way to watch your mind tumble under you.

[The Know-er and the Thinker]

When you hear a noise, who is listening? You are not your thoughts just like you are not the sound that enters your ears. You are the life force behind them, the deeper still self listening that hears them and is timeless. Your thoughts, ideologies, loves and hates are all transient, they change over time, but under all this is the light of of a deeper self that is connected to God and the entirety of the universe.

This idea has been studied for thousands of years that goes back to the dawn of culture. In modern days we have now found simple distilled ways to approach these same insights. One of them that has entered the popular media is Mindfulness. A simple way to find yourself is by watch the mind as it works, thinking for you, notice how after each thought, an emotion follows.

The normal moment to moment process of the mind is one where we perceive, deduce and then internalize the outside world. Our emotions cement the result of our senses and thinking using our understanding of the world and history as we know it. Two people seeing the same scene may have completely different reactions and resulting emotions given their perceptions based on their personal history. The key here is after each thought, it is emotions that make a lasting impression of our perception into our bodies. The body believes what the mind thinks, feelings are that communication between the two and with enough emotion you can be scarred for life.

You think in your mind and feel the emotions in your body. The mind and body connection is one of two speeds. The mind is real-time, it is taking in raw data and providing neurotransmitter signals to produce certain chemicals that then flood into the body which produce emotions we then feel everywhere at once. The body stores these emotions day to day as a long term memory. How you feel when you wake up can color your whole day.

After being flooded with a particular emotion for long periods of time, your body will remember this and kinda get stuck. Watch a horror movie alone late at night. Even though you know it is not real your body still believes what you have been thinking about for the last two hours. Lying alone in the dark trying to fall asleep after, you body is still filled with fear, you find it hard to fall asleep. This is just a movie but still has a large impact. This is why it can be very hard to break out of depression. Even though your real time thoughts may have shifted to better happier things (a birthday party, found money, love) you may still feel bad in your body. You still feel heavy.

Under the wrong control you can be flooding the body with bad emotions causing great pain, stress and ultimately sickness, even if most of what you are thinking about is in the future or past (doesn’t really exist). Worrying about past events or future ones is not unlike the movie. These things although may have really happened or will, are not at the present moment. We are creating them by thinking about them, we make them real and the body feels them just the same.

[The Journey into you]

Most who attempt any path to enlightenment will start with meditation. In reality, it is a fools errand as it is widely known and taught in the West. Instead of trying the impossible: sitting alone in a room, trying desperately to stop thinking. Most will fall asleep or just go through cycles of concentration and varying off into some though, then back to concentration. This is the way of brute force and even the masters of 20 years still compete this cycle over and over. It works for some but I found it tedious and the exact opposite of “relaxing”..

Hold the image of an astronaut floating in orbit outside the Space Shuttle with the world under him. Here you are the astronaut, and the world below you is your mind, cataloging and thinking away like a tireless worker. It is there for you, it is filled with everything you have come in contact with and learned. Even the questions you don’t have answers to, it is all there waiting for you to use it. All the bad that is in the world is in there too. You need this so you can avoid murder, death and harm.

This is the problem, if we don’t realize that our minds have a job to do, that is always collecting everything around us, forming opinions, judgments, predictions.. these are critical for survival, but we get caught up in all this stuff. We think we are all these things, we form attachments and identify with our material objects, social constructs and jobs. When any of these things change, we find great pain. We must shift our identity back to what we really are, our true nature before we were born and had names for things, a timeless presence. The Human mind is the greatest achievement of God and the natural world. The pinnacle of adaptation and evolution. But we must see it for what it is and avoid being swept up by everything it tells us. It can lie to us and hurt us with bad thoughts about ourselves. I can’t count how many times I knew something to be true that just wasn’t so. All the wasted time and emotion, tricked again.

[Inner truth]

Instead of meditation, mindfulness is the opposite approach to the same path. Instead of fighting the mind, become the know-er, step back and watch and listen to your mind under you. Create some space between you and your mind. The mind is a wonderful tool but as it collects everything it comes in contact with, it becomes a garbage bin. Not in he bad sense of the word, without a garbage bin in your kitchen, your home would become unclean quickly. No a garbage bin is very useful, but here you want to sleep in it, that is the problem. You can’t live there.

Instead, by realizing the deeper truth that your true self lies under your thoughts and emotions, a timeless soul that is part of the one great consciousness of God and the universe. By connecting to this power and depth, your mind can go along being very helpful collecting everything about the world, but by allowing your thoughts, and emotions come and go without having to take every one of them seriously, you can live a life with less stress.

Before your parents had you, what was your true nature? Who are you? the things your parents gave you? the house you lived in? the school and lessons you learned? The job you work? The spouse, marriage and children of your family?

You are a wet robot machine created over millions of years of evolution that uses trillions of parts to function. The universe has fucked itself senseless to make you. YOU are the deep presence, down under the emotions and thoughts. You are the one that feels, hears and acts. You can steer your thoughts like a river when you have the strength, but they will always be there coming like an endless flow as the mind is very helpful and ready to serve you for survival.

Become the know-er within. Realize you are the commander of this great robot wet machine the universe through your parents has given you. Can you peek out from within, look through your eyes by sitting inside the master control room like a captain in a master commander chair in the bridge of a great ship? That’s you!

Your mind is your faithful servant that is constantly absorbing everything it hears, sees, touches and smells. Your emotions are fired after these experiences as an instant way to distill the exact effect these things are having to you.

Oh man, not only design your own space and aircraft, but you get to fly them in VR!

The future is so bright with what’s to come and how VR/AR will change the world. In twenty years, I can easily see NASA scientists of tomorrow, will remember how they were first inspired to get into engineering and rocket science from experiences like KerbalVR.

Pretty amazing. Way back in the 80’s, I remember a science teacher I had told me the coming nano revolution will make the digital one seem like a baby’s rattle. That stuck with me all my years and the more I read about nano tech can do, the more I see he was probably right.

There is currently a lot of talk in the media about police body cameras and the issues around recording when they use lethal force. After some reading on the subject I realize the current systems have a few technical challenges. Chief among them, is the manual process of turning a camera on before firing a weapon–or saving after an event occurs. Systems that are always on, still use a rolling buffer that also requires a “hard save” command after an event that dumps the buffer into disk otherwise the video memory is automatically overwritten when the next rolling cycle ends.

After some thought, I have what I believe is a system with the most equality for both police and those they interact with in public. It is my opinion that police in general should be professional and respected, exactly like our U.S. armed services. With respect comes professional, unwavering duty. Such service can not be questioned, and should therefore be no less degraded when being filmed, for both the benefit of the officer as well as the public they serve.

Using the patrol cruiser as a local platform and hub, we can add components to upgrade existing vehicle cameras by adding: two cruiser-mounted, auto-follow cameras; a “VR’ 360 degree central camera; GPS enabled body mounted cameras; NFC; Bluetooth; WiFi; directional microphones and modern web services together can create a unique system that will provide the most information about critical details of the scene during each engagement with the public like never before.

Core unique features include:

Total autonomous usage by officer, no buttons to push the system is always ready and working.

Real-time, comprehensive situation awareness of the scene on and after arrival.

Auto-save and back-up of data the moment any gunshot audio is received by the system no matter where the officers might be.

Static dash cam is upgraded into two, articulating exterior-mounted HD cameras which will auto-follow each officer as they interact outside of the vehicle within line of sight.

Comprehensive collection of location and time data along with accompanying video/audio/testimony data from many angles will allow new crime scene reconstruction, and digital data analysis to help predict threats that can lead to developing early warning systems as well as help find new solutions as Big Data has in other industries.

A 360 degree camera system that will allow Virtual Reality preservation and playback of the crime scene environment.

Intelligently auto-SMS other emergency services with feeds or calls for help by using sensor data to infer when screams/gunshots/fire or other environmental heuristics can determine changing conditions and threats on the ground that require auto-backup or other types of help for a comprehensive response.

In today’s modern world of terrorism, any emergency response system that can help gather clues and reconstruct crime scenes will be invaluable in helping close cases faster to avoid larger loss of life.

Each officer’s body camera will be upgraded to a full mobile phone, allowing for many modern sensor data- including: GPS, accelerometer data as well as Bluetooth and Wifi, VPN connectivity. As soon as the body camera system recognizes it has left the vehicle (NFC/Bluetooth/Wifi), or an environment heuristic is sensed by the system, it will automatically begin recording video and audio with no action required by the officer.

Dual mounted HD cameras using NFC are able to auto-track officers as they interact outside of their vehicle.

Patrol cruisers will be outfitted with two HD cameras that will be mounted on the vehicle emergency light bar. This will allow for a rotating mount, such that, each officer can be automatically followed independently using NFC/Bluetooth/Wifi/GPS by a separate camera as they interact with the public when outside of their cruiser. The system will be able to switch cameras as needed as officers move around the vehicle in different directions, and varying distances. Using software and post-processing, the system will then be able to stitch the video back into a logical form for independent playback as a single camera following each officer without breaking continuity until beyond line of sight.

VR 360 degree video will also be captured by a single camera mounted at the center of the cruiser emergency light bar. This data will allow law enforcement officers the ability to step back into the scene using Virtual Reality which can not only preserve scene data for future investigations like never possible before, but also establish a baseline platform for future advancements in crime scene investigation, officer training, and overall public relations when trying to determine culpability and best practices.

As dash cameras have proven invaluable before, this independent, third-person view will allow for extra data to help protect each officer and the public alike without having to make compromises of where a limiting single-fixed, interior camera would otherwise be used.

The exact moment any gunshot is heard can be sensed by the system end-to-end and made to auto trigger all systems active, including live streams of video/audio to save out of buffer and onto disk. Another signal can also be sent to servers in the main office where they can begin a live, off-site back-up, saving all streaming video and sensor data from the scene for an official separate public copy.

Other patrol vehicles arriving on the scene can add to this data with their own video/audio providing different angles and preservation of scene data.

An optional improvement for even more officer level protection, could include having existing issued officer firearms outfitted with tiny electronics that can aid in capturing exactly when a discharge has occurred. This data can be captured by the body camera hardware the officer wears on his person and rely this along with audio processing from each sensor back to the patrol cruiser and on to the main office/servers. This data will be invaluable to accurately reconstruct events as they really happened, giving prosecutors and the public alike, new tools in increasingly dangerous times.

Microphone and video data from the patrol cruiser, can independently verify the officer’s personal data from his body camera, microphone and gun discharge sensor. Together with GPS, NFC and Bluetooth data, a complete comprehensive system can be created that can combine data from the patrol cruiser, environment and each officer to give a detailed picture of events as they unfold.

One limitation is line of sight. Data preceding many altercations that may happen out of sight of the patrol cruiser or body cameras sensors alike. These data are just as valuable in finding true culpability for all parties involved, and should not be undervalued. Having information about what preceded an off-camera event that a body cam could not capture can be just as important as the actual violent act recorded. Having articulating tracking, and state-of-the-art VR 360 degree cameras on the patrol cruiser will provide more situation awareness about events than we may have with standard fixed dash cams of today. More data to protect the officers and public alike, while providing a new class of platform for future comprehensive crime investigation tools.

Change the settings to HD then place your mouse over the movie, then left-click and drag to move your view. Welcome to the future. And yes, the plane is flying itself in formation.

Watching this, I can’t help but think ahead about how this can be used to extend what we think as normal video/content/movies. Burning houses, couple arguments, shootouts, there will be whole other mini-story Easter-eggs in future content. In the near future because of 360 video, we will always search new videos for hidden stories in the unseen background/angles.

Great talk showing the history and birth of the most consequential languages/OS ever created. Learn the back story and maybe an appreciation for the scale of work done right the first time, especially considering their success and what they delivered is still helping driving new markets today.

From the web to google, to mobile devices, watches, and Smart TVs, our connected lives run on a C/Unix based foundation in many flavors and sizes.